Sam Danny went to school with people from the other side of the road. ‘I think we are looked down upon because of where we come from’.
Photograph: Alecsandra Dragoi for the Guardian

The brick towers of the World’s End estate in Chelsea and the £5m Georgian houses over the road are “two different worlds”, explains Ali Yousef, a 17-year-old who has grown up in one of the poorest parts of London with a bird’s eye view of one of the richest.

“On those roads there they all have Range Rovers,” Yousef said, pointing to Hobury Street, location of one of London’s chicest restaurants, La Famiglia, where rich women with Russian accents and fur coats peruse expensive antique shops. “It’s like it’s all been set up. There’s a Paddy Power and a William Hill and people [from the estate] go over and spend all their money hoping one day they will get lucky and get the Range Rover.”

It hasn’t happened yet. Residents of World’s End, a council estate built in the 1970s with 750 homes in seven high-rise blocks, have an average income of £15,000 a year, according to Dent Coad, while owners of the homes north of Kings Road have average earnings of £100,000.

The view from Rocco Borghese on Kings Road towards the World’s End estate. Photograph: Alecsandra Dragoi for the Guardian

While the World’s End has a Co-op, the other side of Kings Road has Rocco Borghese, a shop selling £35,000 bespoke crystal chandeliers to local millionaires and to clients in Dubai and Saudi Arabia. A mirror, sprinkled with gold dust, sells for £15,000.

“I have worked here for 18 months and I have never crossed the road,” said Catherine Ram, the sales person. “I don’t even know what’s over there.”

Which means she probably doesn’t know there’s a busy food bank relied on by 50 households and problems with gangs and drugs. Of the 10 mostly minority ethnic teenagers hanging out on the walkway one afternoon last week, several had been excluded from school, one for carrying “a shank” – a knife. Many puff on cannabis joints, commenting that children routinely start on the drug aged 11. Two lanes of traffic is all that separates their lives from the rich – and largely white – residents of Stanley Ward, where gardeners, nannies and maids come and go.

The estate has problems with gangs and drugs, and pupils being excluded from school. Photograph: Alecsandra Dragoi for the Guardian

“They shove everyone that is not middle class over here,” explained Yousef, who is studying electrical engineering at college and described the inequality as “not upsetting, just unfair”. “The majority of people live on benefits. People are going to stay poor and stay on benefits unless they do something.”

Sam Danny, 17, who is studying sports science, said he went to school with people from the other side of the road.

“Their families are more financially stable,” he said. “They dress different to me. The way they speak is different. Their home area is different and I think we are visualised differently. I think we are looked down upon because of where we come from. But everyone is the same at the end of the day. We all have our heart beats.”

The estate is not the toughest in London, but there has been trouble nearby lately. A 16-year-old boy was stabbed outside the chip shop opposite the estate last month.

One thing that does unify the two areas is the local Church of England parish, which has two churches: St Andrew’s serves the bankers and lawyers north of the King’s Road, while St John’s serves the estate.

“Life is very different,” said the Rev Paul Dawson, who looks after the richer side. “There are big inequalities and life for a family living on the World’s End includes many more pressures in day-to-day living than on the other side of the road.”

He cited family breakdown, young men growing up without father figures, gangs, drugs. Next week in the community theatre they are putting on a play about food banks.

“There are people who have and don’t have and there’s a breakdown of understanding on both sides,” said Michelle Abbey, who runs the theatre. “I see myself as trying to bridge that gap. The only difference I see is one lives in a council house and one has bought a house.”

Over on the rich side, Paul Warrick, 73, a lawyer who has lived in the area for 44 years and represents Stanley Ward for the Conservatives, stopped to talk.

Piers van Til, an antiques dealer selling chairs for £7,000, said the wealth of the area had increased considerably since its bohemian period in the 1960s and 1970s, but said there was “an acceptance” of the disparity.

“Compared to São Paulo and Johannesburg it’s not that great,” he said, although those highly divided cities may not be the ones modern London would like to be measured by.

Nevertheless, he lamented “a loss of social value and sense of community” as a result of what appears to be the widening of an already stark gap in one of the most socially divided parts of Britain in 2017.

• This article was amended on 13 November 2017. World’s End estate is in Chelsea, not Fulham, and the scheme was approved in 1966 but built in the 1970s.